Astrophysics

Why is the universe the way it is?

Fundamental and philosophical question like that lead me to study physics. I wanted to know more about nature and how it works. And now, it is even my job.

At the moment, I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Before, I was in Santa Cruz for a postdoctoral research position (Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship) at the Department for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. I did my doctorate in science at the Institute of Astronomy at ETH Zurich with Marcella Carollo and with Ben Moore at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at University Zurich.

I'm mainly interested in N-body techniques, integrators, dynamics, cosmological structure formation, dark matter, dark energy, cosmology in general and black holes. During my doctorate, I developed a time-stepping scheme that is based on the true dynamical time of a particle. This is the optimal choice one can make for a time-step in an N-body simulation since every other criterion has regions where it is too conservative (i.e. takes too many time-steps) or can't follow the dynamics correctly (i.e. takes too few time-steps). More details can be found in the paper: An optimum time-stepping scheme for N-body simulations.

Go to my publications page to find more about my publications so far. You can also find my talks during my diploma and doctorate studies and some recent conference talks on my talks page.